


I've Been Drowning All Day

by mytimehaspassed



Category: Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie, Supernatural
Genre: Age Regression, Crack, Crack Pairing, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-10
Updated: 2010-06-10
Packaged: 2017-10-22 09:33:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytimehaspassed/pseuds/mytimehaspassed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s this bitten-down, spit of a curse and there’s Sam’s quick glance to Dean, wide-eyed and frightened and painfully slow, like a dawning realization, and when Dean blinks, when he opens his eyes, all he can see is a sea of green.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I've Been Drowning All Day

**IVE BEEN DROWNING ALL DAY**  
SUPERNATURAL/PETER PAN  
Sam/Dean; Dean/Tinkerbell  
 **WARNINGS** : de-aging; crack; pre-season five

  
There’s this bitten-down, spit of a curse and there’s Sam’s quick glance to Dean, wide-eyed and frightened and painfully slow, like a dawning realization, and when Dean blinks, when he opens his eyes, all he can see is a sea of green. They’re not in Kansas anymore, Dean knows this like he knows there’s something off about this place, this whole thing, something wrong, like he knows this beginning of an ache crawling across his forehead from where he must have hit something. He sits up and brings his hand to his forehead and there’s blood there, red on his fingertips, and he closes his eyes against a stab of pain at the touch.

When he opens them again, he’s still in the same place, just a whole lot dizzier. He groans and brings himself to his feet and there’s something wrong here he knows it, something he can’t figure out yet, something different. He’s in some kind of a forest, big and bright, and there are trees shading him from the sun overhead, trees that are too green, trees that are full of life that skitter and sing across the canopy, and he blinks once and then again, but the ache in his head just won’t go away.

“Sam?” he calls out, and now that’s really weird, because last time he checked, his voice was gravel thick and came out raw. He brings a hand to his throat and feels the length of his sleeve against his skin. He looks down. His shirt is too big, his shoes are too big, his pants are slinging low on his hips, and the familiar scratch of stubble on his cheeks is gone, replaced by smooth, boyish skin.

“What the fuck?” He says, and even that comes out sounding wrong, sounding like a school boy caught imitating his daddy’s tongue. And he’s scared now.

And he can’t find Sam.

“Sam!” He yells. There’s no answer and then he’s running, running farther and faster and without the weight of muscles or scars, running until he sees something resembling the form of his brother, something like a boy in the middle of a clearing, swimming in giant clothes.

Sam looks about eleven or twelve, the same boy Dean used to know, the same boy Dean watched grow up to be a man. Sam turns at the sound of his name, coming from Dean’s foreign voice, and looks up at him in confusion. “Dean?” he says.

And they’re still them, still have the tricks and trades that their father taught them, Dean sees that with Sam’s defensive posture, the hand reaching for the knife in his belt, falling somewhere around his thighs, just because, just in case, and Dean’s thankful for that if nothing else. They’re still them, even if they’re children, even if they’ve forgotten what it felt like to be this young.

“Dean?” Sam says, and he’s holding his clothes to him, holding them so they won’t slip anymore than they have already. “What’s going on?”

And Dean doesn’t know, but he can guess, can guess it has to do with the girl he met the night before, the girl who had bright blonde hair and impossibly blue eyes and skin that glistened like glitter, two long lines on her back from where there used to be something, from where there wasn’t anything now, the girl who wanted more than what he could give her. And she had seen the way he had looked at Sam and she had seen Dean’s hand brush his and she had guessed exactly what that meant and her face had crumbled with misery. She had opened her mouth, small and taut, and she had said something, had thrown something into the air, and then Dean had woke up here.

He tells Sam this, but leaves out the part where he slid his hands over her, where she moaned his name, breathless, against the shell of his ear, where he had tasted her shimmering skin. Leaves out the part where she had kissed him and Dean had wished for someone else’s lips.

He tells Sam this, but leaves in the part where he had seen her throw something, where he had felt something land on his skin. It had been light, it had been golden, but he checks and there’s nothing now.

Sam says he had seen that, too, had seen the blinding light, the flash before their eyes like maybe a thousand stars passing by, like maybe they were in the sky flying, like maybe they fell and this is where they ended up.

“Curse?” Sam guesses. “She could have been a witch.”

But Dean shakes his head.

“Something else,” he says. And maybe not something worse, but this smells of desperation and revenge and Dean knows how fast someone can fall from good. He reaches in his pocket, but there’s no cell phone there, no weapons, no wallet, no keys.

“That bitch better not have stolen my car,” he growls, and he’s angry now, that’s for goddamn sure. He can feel the fury swell in his chest, can feel it tighten his fists. And this is years of teenage anger growing and growing underneath his skin, years of misplaced frustration, and he’s not sure where he could have hidden this away, but it’s rolling out now, it’s filling him up.

“Come on.” Sam breathes out through his nose, knows Dean like he knew him then, when they were both boys, when it was them against their father, them against the world. He starts rolling up the bottom of his jeans, tightening his belt as tight as it can go. He strips off his shirt, leaving his undershirt on, his small, pale arms and the lack of muscle memory. “I saw some smoke over there somewhere. There might be a place to check out.”

Dean looks out where Sam points, an easy mile away from where they stand, through more dense forest, through more thick brush, and he just knows that it’s not going to be easy, he just knows this is going to be another one of those days. He takes a deep breath against the storm of hormones running though his veins, the storm of anger that’s swallowing him whole, and he lets it out, slowly.

“This is such bullshit,” he says, and Sam rolls his eyes.

***

There’s a house that stands in the forest, made of tree branches and the thin, winding vines that lay like rope on the ground. It’s a twisted shell of earth that holds a wooden bed with woven leaves for a blanket and a small, scarred table dripping with dried candle wax. It fits them both because they’re smaller now, even if Sam keeps bending his head on reflex, even if Dean tries to stand with his feet apart, with his shoulders wide. It’s big enough for them, but they stand close together anyway, Dean keeping one arm hovering above Sam’s shoulders, like he’s afraid something will happen, the same fear he always had growing up, the same fear that returned after their father died.

“Weird,” Sam says, as he picks up a long, black feather from the table, traces the carved lettering of names in the wood with the tip. John. Michael. Wendy.

“All of this is weird,” Dean says. He means the house, he means the forest, he means this whole Benjamin Button thing.

The smoke they saw came from the tiny chimney in the house, but if it was lit before, it wasn’t now, even though the last remnants still curled upwards in gray wisps. Dean squares his jaw at the last bit of ashes. “Great.”

Sam shrugs. “But at least it’s something. Someone had to light that fire, so we’re not that far off.” His tiny shoulders don’t convey the same wisdom they used to, but he’s still the smartest person Dean has ever known.

Every time the wind blows, it brings the sound of laughter with it, the beating of drums, and Dean wishes for the hundredth time that he had been brought here with at least one of his guns, at least one of his knives, so he could have some semblance of protection. He clenches his empty fists by his sides and he sighs.

The house is a dead end, but there’s a path leading from it into the woods, leading to the wide base of gnarled tree trunk, where there’s a rope and an opening, and Dean doesn’t think it’s a great idea, but it’s all they have, so they pull the rope and slip inside. They stand in the darkness for a few seconds until Dean steps forward, until Sam steps forward, and then they‘re falling and they‘re falling fast. Sam lets out a surprised yelp, and Dean bites down on his tongue hard, and then the ground comes up to meet them.

Dean has blood in his mouth when he finally stops, somewhere in the darkness, when he blindly reaches out for Sam. He feels the warmth of his brother, feels his own heartbeat in his ears slow in relief. “Sam?” Dean whispers.

“I’m okay,” Sam whispers back, and his voice is small, but there’s no pain that Dean can hear.

Someone lights a candle and the room fills up with a flickering glow. Dean reaches for a weapon that isn’t there, sees Sam do the same. The candle belongs to a boy, a boy with leaves in his hair and a knife tucked into a belt made out of vines.

He smiles and says, “Hello.”

***

The boy’s name is Peter. He stands about the same height as Dean, maybe the same age as Dean is now, not the same age as Dean was yesterday, and his smile is bright and infectious. He tells them that they’re in a place called Never Never Land, that this is the tree in which he lives, that the forest and the fields beyond them belong to him, that everything here belongs to him.

“Everything but the sea, really,” he says, and his hair is a dirty blonde and his eyes are shining, and he’s smiling and smiling. “The sea belongs to the pirates and the mermaids. And the ticking crocodile,” he adds.

The tree is filled with broken toys and scattered clothing and beds made from fallen branches, but the only noise is from Peter, so Dean guesses whoever lived here before has long since vanished. “Is this place,” Dean starts to ask, and then drops his voice the way he used to when he didn’t want to sound stupid, when he was afraid of his father’s answer. “Magical or something?” He raises an eyebrow.

Peter lets out a sharp, high-pitched laugh. “Of course,” he says, like it’s obvious. “How do you think you got here?”

“How did we get here?” Sam asks, and his little boy voice is betraying the soft-spoken, quizzical tone he’s trying to convey.

“By thinking happy thoughts,” Peter says, and then shakes his head. “You guys really aren’t from around here, are you?”

“Not really,” Sam says, and Dean rolls his eyes.

“And we’d really like to go back,” Dean says. “So if there’s a way to do that without picturing ponies jumping over rainbows, we’d love to hear it.”

Peter thinks for a minute, his fists on his hips, his feet apart, but then he shrugs. “We could always get a fairy to give you some of their dust,” he says. And he smiles. “It makes you fly.”

“There’s no such thing as - ” Dean tries to say, but suddenly Peter’s palm is warm and curled around Dean’s mouth.

“Don’t say that!” Peter’s voice is close to Dean’s ear, close enough that Dean can feel the soft exclamation of breath from Peter’s lips. “Every time you say that, somewhere a fairy drops down dead.” His eyes are wide and his tone is deadly serious and, with everything else that’s gone on today, there’s no reason why Dean can’t believe in this, too.

Dean mumbles something against Peter’s palm, his lips sliding against Peter’s skin, and Peter finally pulls away. “Okay, jeez,” Dean says, soft. “I won’t say anything about fairies.” He looks at Sam, who’s trying his hardest not to laugh, and he raises his hands in acquiescence.

“Great!” Peter says, and he’s smiling big again, smiling bright. “We can go now if you like.”

“Why not,” Dean shrugs. Sam’s shoulders are shaking with laughter and Dean just wants to crawl into bed and go to sleep for the next month. “This day can’t possibly get any worse.”

***

He was wrong. He was so, so wrong.

Just as they reached the cove past the forest, just as Peter was reciting the tale of the time Princess Tigerlily was kidnapped by the pirates - leaving Peter and a few brave young men from her tribe (who, Peter insists, just stood around looking shocked and/or weeping onto the staffs of their feathered spears) to rescue her from the confines of Captain Hook, with Peter, of course, arriving just as she was about to step off the Jolly Roger’s wooden plank - a cannonball flew past Dean’s head.

Dean grabs for Sam, his arm sliding around small, thin shoulders, and shoves him to the ground. “What the fuck was that?” He yells, his voice muffled by the loud explosion as the cannonball slices open the middle of what used to be a decently-sized and quite innocuous tree.

“Oh, just the pirates,” Peter says. And then he flies up past the tops of the trees. He stays in the middle of the sky, high enough to just touch the bottom of the clouds and he laughs, long and loud. “You didn’t catch me this time, Hook!” He yells.

“What is this place?” Dean whispers, and if Sam answers, the only sound Dean hears is the humming of another cannonball soaring over their heads.

Peter laughs again as another misses him, as he jumps cloud over cloud, each one disappearing once his feet leave them. “Try again,” He says in sing-song, laughing and laughing.

“This is the worst acid trip I’ve ever been on,” Dean says, and Sam grits his teeth.

“And I have a feeling this is only the beginning.”

***

As Peter explains it, Captain Hook was once the most feared, most gruesome, leader of the ship Jolly Roger until he met Peter Pan. And, for reasons lost to Peter through the slow crawl of time in Never Land, Peter cut Captain Hook’s hand off and fed it to a crocodile who liked the taste so much, he’s been after Hook since that day.

“He also swallowed a clock,” Peter adds. “So he ticks.”

Dean looks at him blankly. “Uh huh,” he says. He’s given up on trying to understand anything that happens in this place. “I think I’m gonna go lie down.” He puts a hand to his head and breathes out through his nose, slowly, laying back against the rocks. His head is swimming and he’s not sure whether it’s because they’re in a small, shallow opening of a cave and the salt water is getting to him or if he really did take acid and this is just one horrible nightmare he’s about to wake up from.

He’s really hoping it’s the latter.

After Peter had led the pirates away from the cove, he had taken them here to hide for a few moments, just in case. Sam was huddled against Dean’s side for warmth as the spray of water leaps up onto their feet, as the wind blows cold, whistling sharp through the rocks.

“So now what?” Dean groans, his eyes shut tight, his whole body exhausted.

“We keep going. The fairies aren’t too far from here,” Peter says. “They’ll give you some dust and then you can go back the way you came.”

“Thank God,” Dean says.

“Will they turn us back, too?” Sam asks. Against Dean, he looks small and fragile, and it’s funny because Dean knows he’s so far from that everywhere else but this place, this horrible and twisted place.

And, yet, something in Dean wants to keep him here because, somehow, this must be better than what they’re used to. Somehow, this must be better than the deep hurt of their father’s death, than the grisly reality of hunting, than this whole fucking apocalypse thing. Something in Dean knows Sam is safe here from all that and maybe it won’t be so bad if they just stay here, if they just fold up get and get comfortable and live as children for the rest of their lives, for as long as Peter has.

Something in Dean wants this, but every other part of him is screaming to get out.

“Back to what?” Peter asks, and Dean thinks he’s already forgotten, as Peter is wont to do.

“To adults,” Sam says. “To the way we were before.”

Peter laughs. “Why would you want to grow up?”

“Oh, brother,” Dean says, and he sighs again.

***

They make it to the forest that houses the fairies without another incident. It takes them longer than normal because Dean and Sam’s feet are smaller, their strides are shorter, and they get tired so much more easily, but they make it and they find the small, twisted pile of branches that the fairies live in and Peter calls them out with his laughter and his smile, and they come to him like fireflies in the dark. They are tiny and beautiful and some of the women flock to Dean with curiosity, stroking his freckled cheeks with their warm, soft hands, leaving kisses like glitter on the bridge of his nose.

It tickles and Dean lets out a surprised laugh, which sends shockwaves of giggles through the girls, who have doted on Peter for so long, they’ve forgotten what other beautiful boys look like. They send showers of golden dust over his face, and suddenly Dean feels lighter, feels taller, and he looks down and his feet are dangling a foot in the air.

“Whoa,” he says. And he looks over at Sam, who’s also in the air, higher than him and laughing, laughing contagiously.

“We’re flying!” Sam says, and now Dean can’t not believe in fairies, floating over the ground as if he were a feather. Now Dean can’t not believe in the magic of this island, of everything Peter has told him.

And Sam looks boyishly pretty in the soft light of the fairies, his wide smile and his glistening eyes and the spread of his heads out in the air, ready to catch something if he were to fall. Dean smiles over at him and Sam smiles back and this must have been what that girl had seen before she sent them to this place, that golden girl and her sharp, ice blue eyes, this connection here that’s been with them for their entire lives, this connection that they’ve both been able to feel, that they could never hide.

And Dean knows that Sam feels it too, and Dean knows that this is something much bigger than Never Land, something much bigger than the place they’re from, than their family, than hunting, than the ending of the world. Dean knows that this is bigger than everything but them, because it’s something they’ve always felt, but never been able to name, something they’ve always been scared of, but never should have been.

Dean knows that this is something they never should have tried to hide from, even if they’ve been doing it all their lives.

And, suddenly, this place is beautiful in a way Dean has never seen it before. The slow creep of dusk over the forest, the tiny bright lights of the fairies, emanating somewhere inside of them, the giant, gnarled trees surrounding them like welcoming arms. The ocean and it’s deep blues and greens and the coral and the shells that it gives to the land, presenting them like gifts. The cliffs and forests and the echoing caverns and creaking of the Jolly Roger and the clouds in the shape of animals.

And, suddenly, Dean never wants to leave, even with the pirates and the crocodiles and the beating of the Indian drums and the hiss of the mermaids beneath the ocean, their eyes like dark coals above the waves. Even with Peter and his arrogant, youthful charm, his smile and the way he looks at Dean, like the way Sam used to look up at Dean when he was just a boy, this kind of adoration, this kind of something more.

Even with them the way they are now, their bodies like children, but their memories still the same. Even with their lack of scars, their lack of protection.

Even if everything could be simpler.

Peter says, “The fairies know the way to your home.”

And Dean says, “Thanks.” And he lifts a corner of his mouth, and it might be a little sad. “Do you think we could ever come back?”

“Sure,” Peter says. “Just remember: it’s the second star to the right and straight on until morning.”

He’s floating in the air with them, fists on his hips, feet apart, and he smiles, big and wide. And Dean smiles back.


End file.
